Share this:

Iran's new president Hassan Rouhani – a "wolf in sheep's clothing" according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photo: AP

Benjamin Netanyahu never mentioned the thaw in US-Iran relations that came when President Obama spoke by phone with his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani. But anyone listening to the Israeli prime minister’s speech to the United Nations Tuesday got the message he was sending to Obama: Don’t be fooled into thinking anything has changed in Tehran.

Rouhani, declared Netanyahu, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. That may make him sound like an improvement over his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a wolf in wolf’s clothing.” But the personality of a president is less important than the reality of the regime. And the reality of Iran is that we will find — as we did with North Korea — that any deal we reach on nukes will be violated from the get-go.

Netanyahu said Iran has not yet crossed the red line he drew last year, but is creating a situation in which it can “rush forward and build nuclear bombs before the world can prevent it.” And a nuclear Iran would threaten more than Israel: It “would have a choke-hold on the world’s main energy supplies, it would trigger nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East. It would make the specter of nuclear terrorism a clear and present danger.”

These are hard truths, the kind of thing we seldom hear from the UN podium. After last week’s fantasy-fest on Iran, that’s also what makes them so refreshing.

Because you don’t get to peace by papering over hard truths. You get to peace by facing up to them. The hard truth about Iran is just what Bibi said: The only answer to its nukes is an approach he summed up as “distrust, dismantle and verify.”